Day 1: Happy International Zine Month!

July 01, 2012:What was the first zine you ever read?

The year was 1986, I was 16-years-old and visiting my Aunt Tookie who lives in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of San Francisco. Most days I would hike down to Haight Street and spend the day exploring. One day I found an odd little publication in a knickknack shop called Murder Can Be Fun edited by John Marr. Now, I'm not a true crime buff, and I don't tend to revel in other people's misery, but I loved MCBF! It was a hilarious and insightful look into the human condition through the lens of murder, mayhem, malice and general misfortune and it spoke to my prematurely cynical teenaged heart. I went back and bought the rest and read them repeatedly. I still have them to this day.

It would take a couple more years until I hit the zine mother lode with the discovery of Factsheet 5 at Powell's in 1988, but MCBF was my gateway to a world previously unrevealed. Books had been an escape and refuge, mainstream (and even alternative) magazines were a window onto a world I had no entry to as a teenager growing up in rural Oregon, but zines were an open invitation to come along for the ride, to participate, and to do-it-yourself! I didn't ultimately start my own zine, although I contributed to many (including Portland's own Snipehunt and Art Rag), but what I did find in zines led me to open Reading Frenzy in order to provide a dedicated outlet for independent, small press, and self-published titles.

Murder Can Be Fun was among the first batch of titles we carried when Reading Frenzy opened in 1994, and continued to be a perennial favorite throughout the 90s and early 2000s. The last issue, #20: A MCBF Miscellany, was published several years ago. Murder Can Be Fun and John Marr will be profiled in my upcoming reading memoir, Many Nuts Were Sent Some Mail.